WASHINGTON — J. Dennis Hastert, who was installed as House speaker eight years ago through backroom maneuvering in a moment of crisis for his party, has no distinct power base in Congress, not much of a national reputation and, in an age of television politics, little polish in front of the camera.

But Hastert has survived and survived to become the longest-serving Republican speaker. And on Thursday, standing outside his district office in Batavia, Illinois, he made it clear that he did not intend to become a casualty of the Mark Foley scandal, saying he expected to win re-election to his seat and run for speaker again when the new Congress convenes in January.

Hastert made his statement soon after the leaders of the House ethics committee promised a vigorous investigation into the handling of the Foley case, approved dozens of subpoenas and said they expected to finish their work in weeks.

Foley, a Florida Republican, resigned from the House last Friday after being confronted by ABC News with sexually explicit messages he had sent to teenage pages.

With both parties still trying to adapt to the fallout from the case with less than five weeks until Election Day, Hastert moved to squelch speculation that he would step down in response to suggestions that he and his staff had failed to heed warning signs about Foley.

Without acknowledging any shortcomings by himself or his aides, Hastert said he took responsibility for the matter. But he seemed to concede that leaders in times of crisis could sometimes fall victim to perceptions as much as to any wrongdoing or bad judgments on their part.

"Any time that a person has to, as a leader, be on the hot seat and he is a detriment to the party, you know, there ought to be a change," Hastert said, answering a question at the news conference about whether he had become a drag on Republican election prospects. "I became speaker in a situation like that."

Hastert got his job in 1998 after the party's first choice to replace Newt Gingrich, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, pulled out at the last minute amid revelations about an extramarital affair. Since then, Hastert has endured a number of crises, in part by staying more in the background while higher-profile colleagues, particularly his one-time sponsor, Tom DeLay, plunged into the partisan fray.

DeLay is now gone, under indictment in Texas in a campaign finance case and under investigation in the Jack Abramoff lobbying case. And now Hastert has been thrust front and center, forcing him to confront the biggest threat to his hold on the speaker's post, and to do so at a time when his party was already nervous about losing control of the House and perhaps the Senate.

Hastert, who had a busy October of campaign travel penciled into his calendar, is suddenly seen as a liability for the first time since being elected speaker. Republican candidates across the nation were canceling, postponing or reconsidering appearances with him, fund-raisers said, wary of campaigning with Hastert, even though pollsters say he carries no more than a 40 percent name recognition.

For nearly a week, Republicans said they saw the need for Hastert publicly to concede that mistakes had been made on his watch. While he stopped short of issuing a direct apology Thursday, saying he still was not aware of the extent of Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, Hastert did declare, "The buck stops here."

Hours later, President Bush called Hastert to offer his support, thanking him for "taking responsibility and for saying the House leadership is accountable," said a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino.

Earlier in the day, officials said Bush would not go further than the measured comments of support he delivered on Tuesday, but they later said they saw Hastert's appearance as an important step toward cooling the furor.

The speaker also won support from former President George Bush on Thursday. In an interview with Larry King of CNN, Bush said: "I'm very, very fond and think very highly of Hastert."

When King asked, "Don't you think he should quit?" Bush responded, "Oh no. No, no, no."

The signs of support were part of a carefully woven effort to bring worried Republicans back on board as the party fights to hold control of the House and the Senate. To do so, Republicans sought to stir suspicions among conservatives that revelations about Foley were delivered as part of a media conspiracy to influence the election.

The strategy largely played out under-the-radar, with Hastert conducting interviews from his home in Plano, Illinois, speaking to conservative talk-radio hosts on Thursday, including William Bennett, Mike Gallagher and Laura Ingraham. Earlier this week, he told his version of events to Rush Limbaugh.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Since leaving Washington on Tuesday, Hastert has remained in his home in the Fox River Valley nearly 60 miles west of downtown Chicago, surrounded by his wife, Jean, and close friends. He took calls from several Republican members of Congress, aides said, and held a conference call with his House leadership team before his afternoon news conference.

Hastert, a former schoolteacher and wrestling coach, is more at home in Illinois than in Washington, traveling back to the state almost every weekend with Scott Palmer, his chief of staff, and Mike Stokke, his deputy chief of staff. When Congress is in session, the two aides and Hastert share a townhouse near the Capitol, living a bachelorlike existence. The speaker once boasted that neither he nor his roommates had cooked a meal since 1986, preferring to dine out.

It is Palmer and Stokke who are now at the center of a House inquiry into when the speaker's office became aware of Foley's conduct. Stokke offered his resignation this week, an aide said, but Hastert declined to accept it.

In Washington, the resignation of Foley has opened the door to the biggest crisis of Hastert's tenure as speaker, a position he neither planned for nor was particularly eager to take over back in 1998. Even after he assumed the speaker's chair, he was seen widely viewed inside the Republican leadership circle as a figurehead to DeLay.

He was neither the leader of a revolution, like his predecessor, Gingrich, nor was he a brash dealmaker like DeLay. His power base, associates say, simply turns on the good will he has earned among the members of Congress. And the Congressional page scandal has been his first solo test since the departure of DeLay in June at holding together a worried Republican caucus.

"The essence of Denny Hastert's leadership is that you lead by letting other people take credit for things," said Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. "That's a strength of his. He's not a limelight seeker."

Hastert's penchant for avoiding the limelight also illustrated a weakness, Republicans said, as he refused initially to accept responsibility for the uproar surrounding Foley's case. He spoke to reporters on Monday, but did not take questions in front of television cameras, a decision that proved to be a mistake, aides said. His remarks on Thursday were televised live.

"It shows he's a specialist at the game of inside politics, not the outside game of public relations," said John Pitney, who studies Congress and teaches government at Claremont McKenna College in California. "He's very good at dealing with members one on one, but focusing on a public message is not his strength."

But in his own district, where Hastert faces a little-known Democratic challenger who is half his age, he responded to the scandal on several fronts, including placing recorded telephone calls to the homes of constituents across the 14th Congressional District.

The calls were quickly ordered up by Hastert's campaign, and recorded by a local announcer, to respond to a telephone recording placed by a liberal group this week that accused the speaker of protecting pedophiles in Congress.

Hastert has largely escaped controversy during two decades in Congress, particularly the kind that has befallen many House leaders before him.

In recent years, though, his steady accumulation of wealth through land deals has been scrutinized, particularly after he sold a parcel of land near a federally financed highway project he supported. His net worth, according to a Chicago Tribune analysis this summer, has risen to more than $6 million from $290,000 during his time in Washington.

His aides have dismissed suggestions that Hastert has used his position to leverage financial gain, saying that he, like others in his fast-developing district, invested during a real estate upswing. At 64, he is looking toward retirement, which he flirted with after the last election.

The president, however, wanted Hastert to stay on and push his agenda through Congress.

"I hope you're going to run again," Bush said at the close of 2004, said Andrew Card Jr., who at the time was the White House chief of staff. "We need you."